Sounds boring.. However, on all our outings I try to find some sort of rock hounding spot for LJ. It’s a dad thing, trying to keep these types of interests alive in our kids. Even the simplest hobby can lead towards a life time interest or career.

We started the day driving to a location called Topaz Mountain in east central Utah. Topaz Mountain is located near Delta and drive is mostly paved. We spent a few hours at the site looking for even the smallest topaz crystals and had no luck. Being novices at rock hunting, most of the time we don’t know what we are looking for. Leaving Topaz Mountain we headed for the Dugway Geode Beds. I needed to find a site that LJ would be able to take some rocks home from and felt that this would be it.  At this point the road changed into washboard gravel.

Dugway Geode Beds are located along the historic Pony Express Trail in Utah. This was a drive that I planned on taking so the stop at the geode beds worked well. The road from Topaz Mountain intersects the Pony Express Trail near the Fish Springs Wildlife area. The drive to Dugway took us through a small mining district were there appeared to be a number of inactive claims.

Finding the turn to the geode beds was tricky because the only sign was for traffic coming the other way. When we got near the site we started checking all the signs, even for the west bound drivers so we did not miss the turn.  It took a little scouting to find the best place to hunt for the geodes. There is a commercial collector that has a large hole dug in the bed. Digging through his tailing’s and remains in the hole provided lots of cool finds. There was another group of rock hunters at the site with more experience than us and they were happy to share and encourage our hunting.

LJ was able to bring home a large ammo can full of geodes so know I need to follow through on my promise of a rock saw.